Private Practice in Public Hospitals: Should Senior Consultants Be Prioritized?

Xidong Guo and Sarah Parlane

No 202301, Working Papers from Geary Institute, University College Dublin

Abstract: This paper proposes a normative analysis which investigates the optimal management of private practices within a public hospital. Private income supplementation induces consultants to attend to more patients which reduces waiting lists and the public cost of healthcare. It is however optimal to cap the consultants’ private income, regardless of seniority. When first-degree discrimination is possible, the more productive (senior) consultants receive a higher private income than their junior counterparts when priority is given to shortening waiting lists. However, they must charge a lower fee when priority is given to protecting the private patient's consumer surplus. When discrimination is not possible, the design of envy-free contracts enables senior consultants to extract rents and these rents increase with the private fee charged by their junior colleagues. As a result, and in this situation, junior consultants systematically get a lower private supplemental income when working alongside senior consultants.

Keywords: Public Hospital; Senior Consultants; discrimination; Healthcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D86 I11 I18 L32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2023-01-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp202301.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucd:wpaper:202301

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Geary Institute, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Geary Tech ().